God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (48 page)

Eliza Vaux would soon try and recall that letter, the one, it will be remembered, that she had written over Easter to her friend, Agnes Wenman:
Pray, for Tottenham may turn French
. Agnes’s mother-in-law, Lady Tasborough, had intercepted it and broken the seal (it was apparently only lightly waxed). She had read treason in the letter and had shown it to her son, ‘saying it was a foolish letter and that Mrs Vaux was a foolish woman to write so’ to his wife. Either just before or just after the King’s visit to Harrowden, Eliza had met up with pregnant Agnes at her daughter Mary’s house in Oxfordshire and had had a good bitch about meddling mothers-in-law.
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A few weeks later, on 31 August 1605, another cryptic letter was penned:

Jack, certain friends of mine will be with you on Monday night or Tuesday at the uttermost. I pray you void your house of Morgan and his she-mate or other company whatsoever they be, for all your house will scarce lodge the company. The jerkin man is come, but your robe of durance as yet not finished …
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Presumably John Grant knew how to interpret Thomas Wintour’s last line. Was he having a buff jerkin made up in anticipation of imminent fighting? This is quite possible, since Catesby was using the war in Flanders as a front for his martial preparations and some of the equipment was being stockpiled at Grant’s house.
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But might Wintour also have been recalling a line from a play about rebellion written by Grant’s near-neighbour from Stratford-upon-Avon?

‘Is not a buff jerkin a most sweet robe of durance?’ Hal asks Falstaff.

‘How now, how now, mad wag? What, in thy quips and thy quiddities?’

What indeed.
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One party visiting John Grant at Norbrook in the early autumn of 1605 was a group of pilgrims travelling to the holy shrine of St Winifred on the north coast of Wales. The patroness of virgins, St Winifred and her well of healing waters had survived the Reformation and attracted hundreds of visitors every year, ‘especially,’ noted the hostile John Gee, ‘those of the feminine and softer sex’. The Jesuits actively promoted the cult and Edward Oldcorne, S.J., would pray to St Winifred on the scaffold in 1606 believing that she had cured him of cancer. The proof of the miraculous waters for John Gerard, in an age when beer was safer to drink than water, was that after taking several gulps from the well on an empty stomach, ‘nothing happened to me’. Victory in war was another reason to make a pilgrimage. Writing for a catechism in the 1590s, Garnet explained that the saints and their shrines could be invoked for ‘particular assistance in some special causes’. He also noted that the strangely sweet moss of St Winifred’s Well contained ‘a singular remedy against fire’.
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Much would be made of the Jesuit superior’s pilgrimage to the well in September 1605 and an itinerary that was seemingly dusted in gunpowder. Garnet always claimed to have travelled for reasons of health – his own and perhaps Anne’s too – and because he had been between houses. He had visited the shrine three years earlier, around the time that he had begun to lose control of his body. He had feared the palsy. He would rather ‘shake at Tyburn than in his chamber’. He ‘marvelled that he had lived so long’. His survival can be attributed, in part, to Anne and Eleanor, who ‘have such care of him that he is able to endure such pains as his office requireth’. Those pains were increasingly mental as well as physical. Garnet suffered from depression and it was getting worse.
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At least he was eating well. He was ‘full faced’ and ‘fat of body’. His hairline was receding as quickly as his waistline was expanding and his beard was ‘grizzled’. He turned fifty in 1605 and looked older. ‘He is always in hiding or in flight,’ the Spanish envoy observed in March. But the music and the Masses continued and the feast days were celebrated with as much ceremony as was safe.
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On 22 April 1605, Garnet had received a visitor from Spain: Luisa de Carvajal, a fiery Spanish noblewoman on a self-appointed mission to save England’s souls. She had arrived at Garnet’s invitation and with his aid. ‘Delicate, sick, physically weak’ and unable to speak the language, she did not blend in well with Jacobean England and her letters were soon peppered with complaints. ‘It is an unbearable country,’ she would write in September 1606, ‘and has certainly not fallen short of the expectation I had of suffering a great purgatory here.’ She carped at the weather (‘very damp and overcast’), the bread (‘so heavy’), the vegetables (‘almost tasteless’), the people (‘no regard for propriety’) and, above all, London, which was noisy, smelly, dirty, diseased and ‘incredibly expensive’. ‘This land,’ she would conclude towards the end of 1607, ‘is full to the brim with the bile of dragons.’ She was an extraordinary witness to the time and place, but not the kind of person one would want around – far less invite to stay – if one was planning an act of terror.
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Although the evidence is not entirely conclusive, Luisa probably stayed with Garnet and the sisters for her first six weeks in England.
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After a humiliating experience at Dover customs, when her ‘instruments of penance’ were laughed at and confiscated, she arrived at ‘the desired location as to a pleasant paradise amid dense woods full of wild beasts’. She was bedridden for a fortnight, but nevertheless ‘delighted’ by the ‘numerous’ Masses, the ‘beautifully decorated’ chapel, the ‘lovely garden’ and, above all, the music: ‘diverse, finely tuned voices and instruments’ and after-dinner motets that were ‘spiritual and moving’. (It was around the same time that a visiting Frenchman found Garnet ‘in company with several Jesuits and gentlemen who were playing music, among them Mr William Byrd’.
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)

Luisa’s paradise could not endure: ‘Because of a warning that the house had been discovered, everyone scattered and fled, some across the fields, others by the river, and, dressing quickly, I had to rush away in the coach with the ladies to London.’
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Garnet’s account of their Corpus Christi celebrations points to the same episode: the feast day (30 May) was kept ‘with great solemnity and music’ and on the day of the octave (6 June) they ‘made a solemn procession about a great garden, the house being watched, which we knew not till the next day when we departed twenty-five in the sight of all in several parties, leaving half a dozen servants behind’.
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If not the house from which they had fled, the manor in Erith on the Thames Estuary was also attracting attention. Local gossip that summer was of ‘great resort’ there,

by persons unknown as well as by five or six coaches upon a Sabbath day, coming in at a back gate newly made on the back side of the house, as by sundry persons resorting thither by water who commonly returned from thence daily in the afternoon or evening of the same day.

The neighbours knew that the house was ‘well stored with wood, seacoal and charcoals’ and that it was ‘usually’ kept by ‘a man and two women with a maid’. Garnet and the sisters also still had White Webbs in Enfield Chase – the Jesuits had a meeting there in November 1604 – but over the summer they feared it was ‘discovered’ and ‘durst not remain there past one night or two’. The house of a Mr Mainy at Fremland in Essex was available to them until Michaelmas, 1605 (though ‘pernicious’ in late summer), and Anne also had a place in Wandsworth. When visiting London, Garnet made use of a chamber in Thames Street ‘at the house of one Bennet, a costermonger hard by Queenhithe’.
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Thames Street’s location by the river, its length (almost wall to wall), and its numerous taverns (because tide-dependent merchants and travellers arrived and departed at strange times) made it a natural choice for anyone wishing to preserve his anonymity. It was here, on Sunday, 9 June 1605, two days after his flight to London, that Garnet received a visit from Robert Catesby. The younger man posited a hypothetical question, ‘a case,’ Garnet recalled, ‘of killing innocents’:

Mr Catesby asked me whether, in case it were lawful to kill a person or persons, it were necessary to regard the innocents which were present lest they also should perish withal.

This, Garnet realised with hindsight, was ‘the first breach afar off’ of the Gunpowder Plot. He replied:

In all just wars it is practised and held lawful to beat down houses and walls and castles, notwithstanding innocents were in danger, so that such battery were necessary for the obtaining of the victory and that the multitude of innocents, or the harm which might ensue by their death, were not such that it did countervail the gain and commodity of the victory.

Catesby made a ‘solemn protestation that he would never be known to have asked [Garnet] any such question so long as he lived’. Only then, Garnet later claimed, did he begin to worry. ‘In truth, I never imagined anything of the King’s Majesty, nor of any particular, and thought it at the first but, as it were, an idle question.’
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Could Garnet really have been so naïve? In fairness, this was just the kind of issue in which a soldier on his way to Flanders – as Catesby claimed to be – might naturally engage a priest. Garnet’s reply was grounded in a military context and upon the theology of Thomas Aquinas (which is still used to excuse collateral damage). He gave a logical answer to a question that he determinedly took to be hypothetical. But he knew Catesby very well. He knew that he was an angry, restless soul, who at least since the summer of 1604 had been agitating ‘for the Catholic cause against the King and the State’. He knew that Catesby had found ‘an invincible argument’ in the papal breves on the succession, the breves that Garnet himself had shown him. Catesby had argued then that a mandate to keep the King out surely also applied to putting him out. Garnet had disagreed, had ‘reproved’ Catesby and reminded him of the Pope’s ban on stirs; Catesby had ‘promised to surcease’.
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That had been a year before their Thames Street conversation, but Catesby had not been quelled. According to the
Narrative
of his confessor, Tesimond, the next twelve months had seen a gradual build-up of tension between the priest and the gentleman, with Garnet urging peace and patience and Catesby asking ‘if there was any authority on earth that could take away from them the right given by nature to defend their own lives from the violence of others’. Catesby had resented Garnet’s ‘lukewarmness’ and accused him of preaching a draining doctrine that made England’s Catholics ‘flaccid and poor-spirited’. He began to avoid Garnet and his injunctions. The Jesuit superior wondered at Catesby’s aloofness and soon learned that ‘apart from the military preparations which he was making for his passage to Flanders, he was having frequent dealings, and that very secretly, with those special friends of his’. If Tesimond is to be credited – and his aim was to exculpate, not undermine, his superior – Garnet saw in Catesby all the signs of ‘a man preoccupied with grandiose and far-reaching schemes’. He knew perfectly well that ‘something was brewing’ and, on 8 May 1605, had expressed his fear that ‘a stage of desperation’ had been reached.
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When Catesby came to Thames Street a month later with (Garnet later admitted) Tesimond in tow, it was surely obvious that it was not for some ‘idle question’. Perhaps Catesby had had an attack of conscience, perhaps Tesimond had insisted he speak to Garnet, perhaps he just needed the Jesuit superior’s name ‘to persuade others’.
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Whatever the case, Catesby left Garnet’s chamber with a theoretical sanction for the killing of innocents, and Garnet, with his ‘penetrating intellect’, ‘lofty but wide-awake’ mind and ‘deep and far-seeing’ judgement, was left to stew.
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‘For God’s sake’ talk to Robin, Anne Vaux implored Garnet around three months later on the pilgrimage to St Winifred’s Well.
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The Jesuit superior had tried, twice, to caution Catesby. ‘Walking in the gallery’ of the house in Essex a few weeks after the Thames Street meeting, he had told him ‘that upon my speech he should not run headlong to so great a mischief’ and that ‘he must not have so little regard of innocents that he spare not friends and necessary persons for a commonwealth’. Garnet reiterated the papal command for quietness. ‘Oh let me alone for that,’ Catesby had replied, ‘for do you not see how I seek to enter into new familiarity with this lord.’

The lord in question was Lord Monteagle, who had accompanied Catesby to Essex along with his brother-in-law (and Catesby’s cousin), Francis Tresham. The four men had discussed ‘how things stood with Catholics’. Garnet asked about their military capability – ‘whether they were able to make their part good by arms against the King.’

‘If ever they were, they are able now,’ said Monteagle, ‘the King is so odious to all sorts.’

Garnet pressed for a direct answer, for he would ‘write to the Pope a certainty’. They answered in the negative.

‘Why, then,’ said Garnet, ‘you see how some do wrong the Jesuits, saying that they hinder Catholics from helping themselves and how it importeth us all to be quiet, and so we must and will be.’

They talked some more: about the 1603 Bye Plot that Garnet had quashed and about the upcoming Parliament – Tresham wanted to see what laws would be made against them ‘and then seek for help of foreign princes’.

‘No, assure yourselves they will do nothing,’ said Garnet.

‘What?’ queried Monteagle. ‘Will not the Spaniards help us? It is a shame.’